What are data center proxies and why do they matter for bot protection?

Data center proxies are how most bad bots arrive at your websites, mobile apps, and APIs. If you want to protect your business and your customers against online fraud, content scraping, DDoS attacks, and more, you need to understand what data center proxies are, why they matter, and how you can block bad bots coming from that direction.

What are data center proxies?

Before diving into data center proxies, let’s first define a proxy. A proxy is an intermediate server between you and the website you want to access. The proxy is responsible for receiving your request, retrieving the relevant information from the website, and sending it back to you. Often, the proxy already has the information you want cached, which speeds up the delivery of the information to you.

Data center proxies are groups of servers entirely dedicated to storing data and processing requests from people and bots that want to access websites. They are genuinely helpful for people. Unfortunately, they are also helpful for malicious bots.

Why do data center proxies matter?

On top of increasing website speeds, data center proxies also make user and bot requests anonymous. Because data center proxies are not affiliated with internet service providers (ISPs), any attempt to understand where a website request came from leads to the IP of the data center, and not the original request. Data center proxies provide anonymity.

Additionally, using the IPs of data center proxies is cheap when compared to other types of IPs. Any fraudster or hacker who wants to attack a website can do so relatively cheaply through data center proxies. That’s why most bad bots, particularly those used for large attacks requiring many IPs, use data center proxies.

Data Center Proxies vs. Residential Proxies

Different from data center proxies, residential proxies tie into ISPs. A residential proxy IP will come from a home network and a machine that may not be optimized for processing large amounts of requests. Residential proxies are slower than data center proxies and more expensive, mostly because they provide IPs that are seen as high-quality and are harder to blocklist for security solutions.

How to block bad bots from data center proxy IPs:

Data center proxies tend to have a range of IPs that are fairly similar. None of these IPs will be associated with an ISP. Additionally, the IPs are recyclable, meaning they will be used several times by different users. 

Manually figuring out which requests come from data center proxies and which do not takes far too much time, because the quantity of requests coming from data center proxies is so large. You need a security solution to help you, but it has to be a solution that doesn’t simply block data center IP requests. After all, some people may simply use a proxy for faster speeds or to stay anonymous.

Instead, you want a solution that blocks bad bots coming from any direction, whether that’s from a data center or a residential proxy. The solution must take into account not just IP reputation, but also a request’s fingerprints, HTTP headers, behavior, etc. 

That’s what we’ve built at DataDome. Our online fraud management solution protects your websites, mobile apps, and APIs from all forms of bad bots, blocking them within milliseconds of their arrival. Residential or data center proxy IPs stand no chance against DataDome’s state-of-the-art bot detection algorithms and SOC experts.

If you want to know how many bots are currently already browsing your website, start your free trial today. It only takes a few minutes to set up, and you don’t need a credit card. Otherwise, you can always contact us to request a demo of our software.